Three Moral Types: Study Maps How Turkish Students Judge Ethical Dilemmas

When a university student confronts an ethical dilemma—a classmate cheating on an exam, a teacher overriding parents, a scarce resource that must be allocated—what determines the verdict they reach? A new study suggests the answer is not simply a matter of gender, age, or personal background, but of something more elusive: a distinct evaluative style that shapes how an individual responds to moral situations across the board. The research, published in Current Psychology, analyzed the ethical judgments of 447 Turkish undergraduates drawn from five universities and found that their moral reasoning falls into three clearly separable profiles, each with its own characteristic way of engaging with right and wrong.

The research team, led by Ahmet Göçen of Afyon Kocatepe University together with colleagues from three other Turkish institutions, used a mixed-methods design that combined statistical modeling with qualitative content analysis. Participants read seven carefully constructed ethical vignettes, each depicting a morally charged scenario drawn from educational and social life. For every vignette, they rated the acceptability of the protagonist’s behavior on a 7-point Likert scale and then wrote out a free-text rationale explaining the judgment they had just made. This dual measurement strategy allowed the researchers to capture not only where students landed on each dilemma but why they landed there, providing a window into the reasoning structures beneath the numbers.

The quantitative centerpiece of the study was latent class analysis, or LCA, a statistical technique that searches for hidden subgroups within a population based on patterns of responses. Rather than assuming that all students respond to ethical dilemmas in the same way, LCA asks whether the data are better described as a mixture of distinct types. Using established model-selection procedures, including the approach pioneered by Nylund, Asparouhov, and Muthén for deciding how many classes best fit the data, the researchers tested successive solutions and settled on a three-class model. The result was a typology of moral evaluators that the authors labeled Accommodating Moderates, Pragmatic Evaluators, and Conviction-Driven Absolutists.

The largest group, the Pragmatic Evaluators, made up 42.2 percent of the sample. These students showed pronounced context-dependence: their judgments swung considerably from vignette to vignette, endorsing a course of action in one scenario while rejecting a superficially similar action in another. Their written rationales, examined through systematic content analysis, suggested that they weighed situational particulars—heavily, adjusting their moral standards to the circumstances of each case. The second-largest group, the Accommodating Moderates, accounted for 35.2 percent. Their defining signature was a consistent avoidance of extreme positions: whatever the dilemma, their ratings clustered in the middle of the scale, suggesting a deliberative reluctance to declare anything categorically right or wrong. The smallest group, the Conviction-Driven Absolutists, comprised 22.6 percent of participants and displayed the opposite tendency, with responses concentrated at the scale endpoints—categorical endorsement or categorical rejection, with little in between.

This threefold structure resonates with a long-standing tension in moral psychology. Kohlberg’s stage theory framed moral development as movement toward increasingly principled, rule-based reasoning, while subsequent work on moral conviction by Linda Skitka and colleagues has documented how some individuals treat certain moral positions as inviolable truths that resist trade-offs. The Conviction-Driven Absolutists in the Turkish sample appear to embody precisely this conviction-based orientation, whereas the Accommodating Moderates echo a well-documented phenomenon in judgment research: extremeness aversion, the tendency to shy away from the poles of any rating scale. The Pragmatic Evaluators, meanwhile, align with issue-contingent models of ethical decision-making, such as Thomas Jones’s influential framework, in which the features of the specific moral issue—not stable traits of the decision-maker—drive the judgment.

Beyond the typology, the study examined how demographic characteristics related to judgments at the level of individual vignettes. Gender differences emerged in three of the seven scenarios, and they followed a coherent pattern. Women more strongly endorsed collective accountability and equity-oriented support, favoring solutions that distributed responsibility across a group or protected vulnerable parties. Men, by contrast, more strongly endorsed professional autonomy in a vignette depicting a teacher who intervened in a student’s situation despite parental opposition—a scenario that pits institutional authority against family prerogative. These findings echo earlier cross-cultural work, including a 67-country study by Atari, Lai, and Dehghani documenting reliable sex differences in moral judgments, and they are consistent with the care-oriented versus justice-oriented distinction that Carol Gilligan famously articulated in her critique of Kohlberg.

Age told a different story. Older undergraduates showed greater endorsement of rule enforcement, procedural consistency, and merit-based allocation across several vignettes, while simultaneously showing less support for care-oriented exceptions—special allowances made on compassionate grounds. In other words, as students progressed through their university years, their judgments appeared to shift toward formalist, rule-governed positions and away from discretionary, needs-based ones. This developmental gradient is intriguing because it runs counter to the intuition that maturity brings greater flexibility; it instead suggests that exposure to institutional environments may reinforce procedural thinking. Comparable age-related shifts toward rule-based moral evaluation have been reported in developmental research by Caravita and colleagues, lending external support to the pattern.

A crucial caveat accompanies all of these demographic findings: the effect sizes were uniformly small. Gender and age nudged judgments at the margins but explained little of the overall variance. The study’s covariate modeling made this limitation explicit. When the researchers entered demographic variables as predictors of latent-class membership, only one contrast reached significance: women had lower odds than men of belonging to the Conviction-Driven Absolutists class relative to the Accommodating Moderates. No other demographic characteristic reliably predicted which of the three evaluative styles a student would display. The implication is striking—knowing a student’s age and gender tells you very little about how they will approach an ethical dilemma, but knowing their evaluative style tells you a great deal.

The methodological contribution of the study may prove as important as its substantive findings. Person-centred approaches such as latent class analysis remain underused in moral psychology, where variable-centred designs that estimate average effects across the whole sample still dominate. A systematic review by Sorgente and colleagues published in Behavior Research Methods found persistent gaps between best-practice guidelines and actual research practice in psychological applications of LCA, making careful implementations like this one a useful reference point. By pairing the statistical classification with qualitative content analysis of participants’ written rationales, the researchers followed the mixed-methods logic articulated by Creswell and Plano Clark, ensuring that the classes were not merely statistical artifacts but were grounded in interpretable differences in how students actually talked about morality.

For higher education, the practical stakes are considerable. Universities increasingly treat ethics as a teachable competency, embedding modules on academic integrity and professional ethics into curricula across disciplines. But a one-size-fits-all ethics curriculum may land very differently on a Pragmatic Evaluator, who reasons case by case, than on a Conviction-Driven Absolutist, who anchors judgments in firm principles. The Turkish findings suggest that ethics educators should attend to evaluative styles when designing instruction: absolutists may benefit from exercises that explore the costs of inflexibility, while pragmatists may need help identifying the stable principles that should constrain situational judgment. With Turkish higher education enrolling millions of students and facing ongoing public debate about academic dishonesty and institutional integrity, understanding the moral architecture of the student population is more than an academic exercise. The study’s authors note that their data are available upon reasonable request, and the research protocol was approved by the Afyon Kocatepe University ethics committee under the Declaration of Helsinki, with informed consent obtained from all volunteers. What the work ultimately delivers is a reminder that moral judgment is not a single dial that demographics set, but a landscape of distinct styles—each deserving to be understood on its own terms.

Subject of Research: Moral-reasoning profiles and ethical judgment styles among undergraduate students

Article Title: Moral-reasoning profiles of Turkish undergraduates: a mixed-methods analysis of ethical vignettes

Article References: Göçen, A., Türkoğlu, M. E., Doğmuş, A., Oyebamiji, O. A., & Özkal, E. S. (2026). Moral-reasoning profiles of Turkish undergraduates: a mixed-methods analysis of ethical vignettes. Current Psychology, 45(17), Article 1496. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10036-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10036-5

Keywords: moral psychology, ethical decision-making, latent class analysis, higher education, moral reasoning, Turkish undergraduates, ethical vignettes, mixed methods, gender differences, moral conviction, academic integrity, person-centred analysis